Good Morning, Harvard Square

Today, Bostonians can turn their radio dials to 95.3 WHRB-FM to hear everything from classical programming to jazz and blues to under-the-radar rock acts. From its radio array atop One Financial Center, the tallest building in downtown Boston, Harvard’s radio station sends its sound out across the greater Boston area. But in 1956, Harvard Radio Broadcasting, Inc. (WHRB) was only available to those plugged in to Harvard’s electric system.

Unlike FM/AM radios, which interpret signals received from the air, WHRB’s signals were carried through University electrical wiring. Thus, only students with audio devices powered by Harvard’s electricity could receive WHRB’s programming.

Throughout the 1955-56 school year, WHRBies fought to get their station onto the FM airwaves to service a larger audience. Though the path had been partly paved by Princeton’s radio station, which had already switched to FM, Harvard Radio faced an uphill battle to get off the wires and on the air.

In February 1956, WHRB President Geoffrey M. Kalmus ’56 announced that the station might begin to make the switch to FM in the next year. Though he claimed that the move wouldn’t affect programming—WHRB would “still be primarily for the Harvard community,” Kalmus told The Crimson, and would still broadcast for 95 hours per week—the station would be able to reach a much wider audience. The station gained the approval of the Faculty Committee on Undergraduate Activities in May, and began the process of getting the go-ahead from the Federal Communications Committee.

Approval for the switch finally came in February of 1957, and WHRB began construction of the equipment that would allow for FM broadcasting. And in addition to reaching an audience of about 250,000 in the greater Boston area, WHRB hoped to increase the quality of its broadcasts.

“All the recent emphasis on long-playing records and high fidelity,” Victor F. Andrew ’57, the WHRB president at the time, told The Crimson in December 1956, “have made people come to expect high-quality reproduction.” Broadcasting on FM would allow WHRB to achieve the level of quality its listeners expected. And though the station had to raise several thousand dollars to purchase the new technology, the greater listening audience allowed WHRB to increase its advertising rates.

WHRB’s leadership continued to repeatedly stress that the station would still cater to the Harvard community.

“Even with FM,” Andrew told The Crimson, “we’ll still emphasize—and be geared to the tastes of—Harvard. We just hope the other 250,000 people who can listen to us will have Harvard tastes.”

“We’ve never tried to compete with the Boston popular music stations,” Programming Director Gregory W. Harrison ’57 told The Crimson at the time. “What popular music we do play is usually jazz.” In 1956 over 70 percent of the station’s airtime was dedicated to classical music.

CHANGING TASTES, CHANGING TUNES

The changes that began in 1956 initiated a period of rapid growth for WHRB. In 1958 WHRB took steps toward changing its radio frequency and boosting its total wattage by 80 percent, which would allow the station to reach an even larger audience. It landed at its current frequency—95.3 FM—in 1967, when stereo broadcasts began. And in 1995, it moved its transmitter from Harvard Square to its new location at the top of One Financial.

In some ways, WHRB’s programming hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. It still plays at least nine hours of classical music daily, and jazz remains a prominent part of its programming. Nowadays, though, the Record Hospital takes over late at night to play, according to its website, “best punk, pop, hardcore, emo, noise, death grind, new wave, no wave, post punk, prepunk, indie, crust, and whatnot that we can damn well get our hands on.” And their focus is no longer “geared to the tastes of Harvard,” as it was in the 1950s. WHRB President Ashwin Vasan ’99 told The Crimson in 1998 that “Our audience base is not students. The fact that we are in some sense ‘college radio’ is only reflected by the fact that we are staffed and run by undergraduates.” And David A. Rios ’07 recently told The Crimson that the Record Hospital appealed mostly to “old drunk guys, prisoners, hipsters, knowledgeable twenty-to-thirty-somethings.”

WHRB initiated its switch to FM broadcasting so that it could reach a wider audience and provide better service to the University. But the changes that began in 1956 grew beyond anything the original WHRBies could have imagined. Today, the station doesn’t look to the student population for its listenership, and fills a niche that doesn’t appeal to many on campus. But WHRB has listeners all over the greater Boston area, and the very idea that the station could find listeners outside of Harvard’s bubble was made possible by the first tentative steps toward FM broadcasting.

—Staff writer M. Aidan Kelly can be reached makelly@fas.harvard.edu.